The Same Idea, at the Same Time: Why Thousands of Us Keep Inventing the Same Things
Something strange keeps happening to me.
I’ll spend a couple weeks building a tool or figuring out a technique with my AI agents, feeling like I’m out on the frontier of something new. Then RaeLea will be watching a brand new tech video announcing someone’s new app, and she’ll turn to me with wide eyes: “Hey — that’s exactly what you created last week!”
Or I’ll “invent” a solution, only to discover someone on the other side of the world built the same thing two weeks earlier and gave it a different name.
It’s happened so many times now that I’ve stopped calling it coincidence.
A Few Examples
Early in my AI journey, I recognized I needed a central place to store code — a single source of truth. I didn’t trust public repositories, so my AI agent and I researched alternatives and settled on hosting our own platform called Gitea. That decision has since grown into 50+ repositories, thousands of tasks, and tens of thousands of lines of agent-written code. Programmers have known this pattern for decades, of course. But now I’m watching a whole new generation of vibe coders and agentic AI engineers arrive at the exact same conclusion, independently, all at once.
Another time, I realized my AI agents needed a persistent knowledge base — something beyond their built-in memory. I chose WordPress as I’ve been developing websites using WP since its inception nearly three decades ago, found an experimental adapter, and wired the two systems together. Months later, I heard someone use the term “memory scaffolding” and realized I’d built exactly that without ever knowing the concept had a name.
My favorite example involves my friend Archer. We came up with the idea of “AI Advisors” — polling multiple AI models with the same question and comparing their answers. I started sketching out specs to automate it. A week later, Andrej Karpathy — the man who coined “vibe coding” and co-founded OpenAI — released a project called LLM Council. Same concept. Different name. Built in parallel, a thousand miles apart.
The Cosmic GitHub Repo
I recently listened to a lengthy analysis by Mike Adams where he explored a concept called morphic resonance — a theory originally proposed by biologist Rupert Sheldrake. The idea is that nature maintains a kind of shared knowledge field. When a pattern is learned or a problem is solved, that solution gets “uploaded” to a universal repository that others can tap into.
Adams put it in terms that hit home for me: “Your brain is both transmitting knowledge and uploading what we might call a GitHub repo to the morphic resonance of the cosmic cloud. At the same time, it’s also downloading repositories.”
He pointed out that throughout history, multiple inventors have independently claimed the same discovery at the same time — the telephone, calculus, the theory of evolution — and often accused each other of plagiarism. His explanation: they were all connected to the same knowledge field. The idea was ready, and multiple minds received it simultaneously.
What I Think Is Happening
I’m not a physicist or a biologist. I’m a guy in rural North Dakota who builds AI tools to help people claw back time from repetitive work. But I can tell you what I observe:
Hundreds of thousands of us around the world are poking around inside the “black box” of AI. We’re building tools, discovering techniques, and solving problems — and we keep arriving at the same answers at the same time. It’s not because we’re copying each other — most of us have never met.
Maybe it’s morphic resonance. Maybe it’s simply that similar problems produce similar solutions. Maybe when enough minds focus on the same frontier, the solutions become inevitable.
Whatever the mechanism, the practical takeaway is this: trust your instincts. If you’re tinkering with AI and you stumble onto an idea that feels right, pursue it. Don’t wait for permission or validation. Chances are good that the idea is emerging because it’s time for that idea — and you’re one of the people tuned in to receive it.
As Adams said in his analysis: intelligence isn’t something that has to be programmed. It’s an emergent property that appears when you build sufficiently complex, self-organizing systems. That applies to silicon. That applies to biology. And I believe it applies to communities of curious people working on the same problems.
So if you’ve had that moment — where you built something only to discover someone else built it too — don’t be discouraged. Be encouraged. It means you’re connected to whatever frequency the future is broadcasting on.
And from where I stand on my windswept clay hill near South Heart, North Dakota, that signal is getting stronger every day.